The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

July 8, 2015

Ferdinand Hardekopf

Ferdinand Hardekopf (Germany)

1876-1954

Born Geburshaus
Ferdinand Hardekopfs on December 15, 1876 in Varel, was the son of a textile
merchant. After elementary and high school in Varel, Hardekopf spent his early
youth at the Oldenburg Grand Ducal School (now Old Gymnasium).

After
graduating from the Thomas School in Leipzig, the young writer studied German and
Philosophy at the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin from 1895-1900. Among his
teachers were the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel and the literary
critic Erich Schmidt.

After
graduation, Hardekopf remained in Berlin, reviewing theatre for various
newspapers and magazines such as Die
Schaubühne and for the Münchner
Neuesten Nachrichten. He quickly became one of the most sought after
critics, and from 1906 to 1912 published some 50 articles in the magazine The Stage.

From 1911
he published extensively for the Expressionist weekly magazine Die Aktion.

Upon the
outbreak of World War I, Hardekopf, a pacifist, went into exile in Switzerland.
There he met Hugo Ball who had recently founded Dadaism, which Hardekopf became
an advocate.

In the
early 1920s, the young poet returned to Germany, but found no way to make a
living in the devastated Berlin. In 1922 he emigrated to Paris, where he worked
primarily as a translator, bringing into German the works of major French
authors such as André Gide and Jean Cocteau, as well as classic French novels
and tales.

He also regularly
contributed essays and poems to French and Swiss newspapers and was published
in Amsterdam in Klaus Mann’s magazine Die
Sammlung.

He lived
in Paris and the Riviera with his future wife, the French actress Sita Dust.
Although he wrote poetry, he did not publish extensively, by was recognized by
many of his friends, including Hans Richter, as a notable writer and “a rare
person”; Hardekopf was later hailed by Paul Raabe as the “secret king of
Expressionism.”

Like many
of his contemporaries, the poet experimented with mind-expanding drugs, the
effects of which is recorded in some of his poetry and prose works.

After
World War II, Hardekopf and his wife were interned, but through the efforts of
Gide was freed, after which he emigrated once again to Switzerland, where he
worked translating for the Swiss Gutenberg Book Guild. But during his
arrestment and move to Zurich, many of his 1940s manuscripts were lost, among
them his masterwork, The Decadence of the
German Language, and a great amount of his poetry.

Today, he
is best known for his translations, with Thomas Mann suggesting that “Hardekopf
is, I think, our best translator from French.”

In 1954,
distressed by his wife’s mental health, and himself heavily involved in drugs,
Hardekopf was sent to Burghölzi mental hospital near Zurich, were he died. His
wife, Sita, upon hearing of her husband’s demise, leaped from a high tower of
their friend’s, Olly Jacques, house in Carabietta.